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Rh tell you everything." She took him down into a warm curtained room, blew to flame the grey ashes on the open hearth, gave him elder wine to drink, hot and spiced, and kneeling before him, rubbing his cold, bare feet, she told him.

"There are certain children born now and then—it does not often happen, but now and then it does—children who are not bound by time as other people are. And if the right bit of magic comes their way, those children have the power to go back and forth in time just as other children go back and forth in space—the space of a room, a playing-field, or a garden alley. Often children lose this power when they are quite young. Sometimes it comes to them gradually so that they hardly know when it begins, and leaves them as gradually, like a dream when you wake and stretch yourself. Sometimes it comes by the saying of a charm. That is how Edred and Elfrida found it. They came from the time that you were born in, and they have been living in this time with you, and now they have gone back to their own time. Didn't you notice any difference in them? From what they were at Deptford?"

"I should think I did," said Dickie—"at least, it wasn't that I noticed any difference so much as that I felt something queer. I couldn't understand it—it felt stuffy—as if something was going to burst."

"That was because they were not the cousins you knew at Deptford."

"But where have the real cousins I knew at